Articles by Jerome Shea
Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is [email protected].
And Another Thing...
January 26, 2010
So, as I predicted in “Juggernaut,” along comes, electronically, my invitation to this summer’s high school essay reading, my ticket to beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. I am very happy about this. Almost happy enough to still the terrors that strike at my vitals when I realize that this means another …
Juggernaut
January 18, 2010
Yet again I have been almost brought low by technology. I say “almost” because I haven’t given up yet, though it may be a near thing. A certain outfit that I sometimes work for has sent me an on-line form to fill out for them. It wasn’t always this way. These people and I used to communicate by …
Face the Music
December 23, 2009
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write this wonk (the first line on my note pad reads, “Is Techno Guy worth it?”). But this week the UNM Chorus, the Dulce Sueno Chorus, and the UNM Orchestra, under guest conductor Stephano Miceli, performed Brahms’ German Requiem, one of the masterworks of the Western …
Whales
December 6, 2009
Ever notice that some animals seem to have real trouble following the script? Take your penguin, for example. As a bird he is a disgrace (I’m sorry, but it’s time somebody said so and if it has to be me, well there you are then). Your penguin could pass muster as a portly butler in a whodunit, but …
Security Fable
November 29, 2009
If you ponder Krutch’s security axiom—security lies not in what one has but in what one can do without—long enough, you inevitably remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper, one of Aesop’s most famous fables. The details vary a bit in each telling but basically we have a happy-go-lucky …
Security
November 22, 2009
Way early in my teaching career, I used a book by Joseph Wood Krutch entitled The Desert Year. Krutch (1893-1970) was a drama critic, an English professor, a naturalist, a graceful writer, and, I have always thought, a wise man. The Desert Year is a collection of essays inspired by his observing and …
Security a la Carte
November 22, 2009
Last week I said that Joseph Wood Krutch’s axiom—which I usually phrase as “security lies not in what one has but in what one can do without”—may have more to do with morality than with materiality. I think it does, but I would like to put that on hold for a bit. And I have been telling my faithful …
Digital Watch
November 8, 2009
Last week, after my watch fell into the boiling spaghetti water (don’t ask), I guessed that I would need a new one soon. Although it did dry out enough to begin working again, it began to get very creative in its time-telling. When the sun had just come up but my watch told me it was 1:47, I went …
Nightmare
November 1, 2009
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, said Freud famously, and he set us off on that road in the scientific quest for dream understanding. Dream analysis can be a very helpful tool to serious psychoanalysts. Downscale, we have the dream interpreters in the daily papers. Often those …
Dream On
October 25, 2009
Last week, when I was visiting son Dan in San Diego, I had my usual anxiety dream and was telling him about it, somewhat bemused because here I was in La-La-Land, having a wonderful vacation with not an obvious care in the world. Anyway, I refer to “my anxiety dream” in the singular because it …